A photo posted by arthur_amerinz (@arthur_amerinz) on Jan 23, 2017 at 3:59pm PST

The Instagram photo above is of a small visitor to our deck: A skink. New Zealand only has two kinds of lizards, geckos and skinks, so it’s not that surprising that I hadn’t seen one before. So, it was special and kind of fun.

New Zealand has several native species of skinks, and an introduced species from Australia called the "Plague Skink". I wasn’t able to work out which species visited us, and it may even have been a juvenile, which would have made it harder to identify. I don’t know enough about reptiles to even hazard a guess, let alone identify the visitor correctly.

I’m glad that New Zealand’s reptile population does NOT include snakes—I hate snakes. But it would be nice if the skinks visited every now and then. But, then, clearly there’s a first time for everything.